La lirica di encomio nel Rinascimento: teoria e prassi poetica di un genere sociale

This thesis aims to present a comprehensive overview of the Italian praise lyric of the Renaissance, an extensive literary phenomenon examined throughout the two main sections of this work, dedicated to the theoretical and compositional aspects respectively. In the first part, the research is focused on the rhetorical and poetical theories related to the encomiastic literature. Firstly, I provide a summary of the epideictic precepts of the antiquity, from Aristotle to Quintilian and the rhetor Menander, in order to inspect their subsequent applications during the Renaissance period, within the definitions of the Italian poetical genres, and particularly lyric. Thus, this section of the thesis proceeds with the study of a corpus of various theoretical works in Italian and Latin – treatises, lezioni, dialogues, espositioni and other commentaries on poetical texts – focusing on these different aspects: the relation between poetry and rhetoric; the general topics, characteristic to the poetical composition; the main elements of praise, pointed out by the Renaissance critics. While it appears that a cohesive set of principles on praise lyric did not exist, through this investigation it is possible to notice that the encomium is often presented as an intrinsic element of the lyric genre. The second part of this thesis provides an extensive survey of the Italian lyric practice, between the second half of the XV century to the end of the XVI, in order to identify the main topics and rhetorical devices of the praise composition. After collecting a corpus of more than 3000 texts, I have divided them into homogenous categories, based on the different subjects and occasions of the celebratory compositions: encomium of women, princes and aristocrats, clergymen, poets and artists; lyric poems for funeral occasions, for weddings and births, for military victories; praise of cities and places; laudatory poems related to real artistic portraits. For each category, I provide a general overview, focused on the circulation and the main rhetorical and literary models of these different texts, then I examine the main topics and tropes. Thus, it is possible to identify which elements are typical of the Italian praise lyric in a more general sense, usually readapted to the diverse subjects or occasions, and which, in turn, are specific to a single category.